“So how are you adjusting to your first months in university, Al?”
“Pretty good, Father. I’m meeting a lot of friends and learning quite a lot of new things. Although, I still have to take more proficiency tests to find out if Law is really the course for me. I just want to make sure that I take the first steps right!”
“Wow, you already sound like a lawyer to me,” I said in jest.
“That’s what everyone says, Father. Just because I talk a lot and appear to be confident with myself,” he said as he smiled.
“I guess you’re also adjusting well to peer pressure?”
“Peer pressure?” Al asked and paused for a while as though it was his first time to hear the term.
“Surely, there are other kinds of pressure in the university other than academic ones, right?”
“Yes, Father. But I feel that isn’t too much of a problem.”
“That’s nice to hear and quite rare to find people your age who handle outside pressure easily.”
“I guess I owe it all to dad,” he explained.
“Really?”
“Yup. I cannot forget how he once explained peer pressure to us. He compared it to water pipes and said that if there’s good pressure inside, then there isn’t really any danger of any pressure from the outside.”
“That’s a very interesting analogy, please continue,” I straightened myself in my armchair.
“If the pressure inside of us –that is, convictions, virtues, customs, etc.– either is equal or greater than the external one. As long as we build strong inner convictions, we should not be afraid or feel threatened by the pressure from without. He suggested that instead of waiting for our peers to pressure us, we should pressure ourselves and in turn pressure our peers.”
“Hey, did you know that I just read something similar from St. Augustine?”
“Really, Father?”
“Here, let me read it to you: Always progress, brethren. Examine yourselves sincerely every day, without vainglory or complacency, because there is no one inside you obliging you to blush or boast. Examine yourself, and don’t be content with what you are, if you want to become what you still are not. For as soon as you become complacent, your progress stops. If you say ‘enough’, you are lost.”
“That’s really cool, Father! Where to find that quotation, Father? I could just post that in my blog.”
“Let me see, the footnote says it’s from Sermo 169.”
“But Father, you know what, although I can imagine that St. Augustine says there isn’t anyone inside obliging us, I feel that our Lord is actually there waiting for us, pressuring us lovingly to correspond.”
“I totally agree with you, Al!”
“And now that I’m in college with my other siblings, we realized more why mom and dad were kindda strict with us. In the end, it was so that we could interiorize their loving pressure and foster virtues within, and slowly form strong convictions that would help us to forge a clear path in life for ourselves and others.”
“Do you realize that this manner of pressuring ourselves is exactly what the saints did all their lives?”
“Yes, and of course they had their ups and downs,” Al added.
“True, but it seemed that even these ups and downs raised them to a higher level and did not remove them from attending to the most trivial things in life.”
“But how do I now put pressure on my peers, Father?”
“Oh, you mean apostolate?”
“Yes,” he said as he eagerly waited for an answer.
“I recall what St. Josemaría would often advice. He said that our apostolate is the overflow, the natural consequence of our interior life.”
“So with the pressure of my interior life, we will naturally infect others with the good water inside!”
“Precisely, and if we are consistent with ourselves, St. Josemaría taught that we will naturally exude the bonus odor Christi, or the good fragrance of Christ to our surroundings.”
“Got to go, Father!” Al picked up his knapsack.
“Where to?”
“Oh, another kind of pressure,” he said as he winked at me.
“Another kind?”
“From someone special.” Al said as he quickly disappeared behind the door.